The Great War on the Small Screen: Representing the First World War in Contemporary Britain. Emma Hanna. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.
For many Americans—at least those less than about 98 years old—World War I is barely a blip on the historical screen. The assassination of an Austrian archduke in Sarajevo ignited a devastating conflict that ravaged Europe from 1914 to 1918. But the United States didn’t enter the war until 1917, and emerged comparatively unscathed. It’s true that American troops suffered losses on the battlefield, Congress passed the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, and everyone risked succumbing to the deadly pandemic known as the Spanish Flu. But for most Americans, “The Great War” was primarily a prelude to the conflict that would really matter: World War II.
In Britain, however, it is another story. Every town square has a stone obelisk and every church a bronze plaque commemorating “The Honoured Dead.” On November 11, the anniversary of the Armistice, everyone pins a red paper poppy to her lapel and pauses to observe the “Two-Minute Silence” at 11 a.m. Although Remembrance Day marks a somber day of respect for those who fell in any war, the First World War is perhaps the most iconic and the most poignant.
So it is hardly surprising that British television has produced a stunning array of documentaries, dramas, comedies, and even reality television focused on some aspect of World War I. Emma Hanna, a lecturer in history at the University of Greenwich, describes how these programs were conceived and developed, as well as the controversy that often surrounded them, in her book, The Great War on the Small Screen: Representing the First World War in Contemporary Britain.
Beginning with The Great War, a twenty-six-part series produced by the BBC in 1964 and considered to be Britain’s first modern documentary, producers “melded the skills of journalists with those of filmmakers and historians” to tell a British-centric story which largely reinforced the conventional wisdom that the war was fought primarily by gallant volunteers who pursued a deadly and largely pointless enterprise and were betrayed by inept leaders. In Battle of the Somme (BBC, 1986), actor Leo McKern (better known to many Americans as “Rumpole of the Bailey”) took viewers to the battlefield itself, and the producers drew on the rich and evocative artistic legacy of wartime poets and composers to create a first-of-its-kind arts-style documentary describing what it was like to be part of the “poor bloody infantry that died there.”
Members of the British High Command, particularly Field Marshal Douglas Haig, were widely vilified in the programs produced in the 1970s and 1980s, and those images endure. When in 1996, the BBC attempted to provide greater context with Haig: The Unknown Soldier, professor Gary Sheffield, who appeared in the program, complained that he received hate mail after the broadcast from viewers who objected to what they saw as his attempt to challenge the stereotype.
Meanwhile, the wildly popular drama series Upstairs, Downstairs (London Weekend, 1974) devoted an entire season to the experiences of the residents of 165 Eaton Place during the war, while The Monocled Mutineer (BBC, 1986), a fictionalized account of an incident at a British base camp in Étaples, France, in 1917, prompted Conservative MPs to decry left-wing bias and demand the resignation of Director General Alasdair Milne after an inaccurate claim about the series’ historical accuracy was distributed by an outside advertising agency.
But perhaps the most enduring images of the Great War for many viewers were derived from, of all things, the comedy series Blackadder Goes Forth (BBC, 1989). Actors Rowan Atkinson, Hugh Laurie, and Tim McInnerny played British officers stationed in France, with Stephen Fry as a callous member of the High Command and Tony Robinson as the downtrodden Private Baldrick, never at a loss for yet another “cunning plan” to avoid facing combat. The final episode, aired just a few days before November 11, concluded with all the cast, with the exception of Fry, going “over the top” to their deaths. The series was widely praised by the industry and the military alike. It won two BAFTA awards, and during the 1990s, British forces serving in the Middle East adopted a black adder as their emblem.
Over time, as Hanna describes it, British historical television programming evolved from the “grand narrative style” documentaries to place greater emphasis on the stories of individuals, such as accounts of the mythic “Christmas Truce” of 1914. These efforts to put a human face on war morphed into the “experiential reenactment” of The Trench (BBC, 2002), where modern volunteers experienced life in the trenches—though without poison gas or live ammunition attacks. Many media critics claimed it trivialized the war, and the last surviving veteran of the trenches, Harry Patch (who died in 2009 at the age of 111), contended that “the younger generations will never understand what we went through.”
In the end, of course, they never can. But as Hanna acutely observes, in Britain, at least, the act of watching these programs has become an essential part of the ritual of remembrance. The challenge for both historians and television producers will be to produce programs that they will actually want to watch.
JANE E. KIRTLEY
University of Minnesota